At the start of the 2008-2009 flu season, Google has launched a brand new analytic web tool, which it hopes will forecast the spread of the flu virus in a particular geographic region. Such a forecast may be used to facilitate care and treatment of flu patients. This free tool, dubbed “Google Flu Trends,” is accessible to the public.
With the help of Google’s new system, it is possible for flu outbreaks to be tracked faster than ever before. By monitoring the keywords and phrases entered in web searches, the system may identify concentrations of computer users stricken with the flu. For example, a patient might enter “fever” and/or “fatigue” and/or “chills” and/or the term “flu” itself. By tracking so-called “flu-related” searches, the system may predict trends in terms of outbreak and spread of the flu. Equipped with such knowledge, local and state health officials may become better equipped to begin treating sick patients, presenting with particular symptoms, as “flu patients,” and provide them with specific medications targeting flu. Prompt and correct treatment of flu patients reduces the number of new flu cases.
The reasoning behind Flu Trends is that people turn to web searches to research symptoms and medical conditions afflicting them. Of course, not everyone who performs such a web search will have an illness; searches may be motivated by mere curiosity. At the same time, by extrapolating from a large sample size of user data, Flu Trends could demonstrate a correlation between searches and terms and the number of users with flu-like symptoms. The resulting data will be broken down by geographic regions.
According to Google, test runs of an earlier version of Flu Trends demonstrated that the program was able to detect flu outbreaks within the United States up to two weeks before the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) was able to do so.